Читать книгу Richard Temple - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 9

From those early days in Chelsea when he was a student at the Reynolds he recalled – what? A confused jumble of impressions: parties, keen but unreal poverty (an allowance stood between him and the world): a variety of living places: but over all there floated a general feeling of impatience and dissatisfaction. The period was nearer to him, as far as anything could be near to this strangely isolated present, which scarcely had the ordinary dimensions – but it was the part of his life that he had revisited the least; the person he met there was sometimes barely recognisable, and although he did feel a kind of impatient pity for him sometimes, it was difficult as well as humiliating even at this distance to be identified with that person’s more embarrassing excesses.

However, that young stupid man’s maladies of growth were perhaps not so much worse than those of the general run: at any rate they should be looked at impartially; and in an attempt at putting order into his thoughts he tried to recall the sequence of his rooms, from that first enchanted den with a window on the Thames to the house with the pigeon-loft on the King’s Road which saw the last days of his protracted adolescence. He remembered leather-aproned Hare, the removing man, who lived with Burke, his little horse, in a green triangular place, a hay- and stable-scented vestige of the rural village, near the sad walls of the workhouse, and how he had walked so many times by Hare’s van: Dovehouse Street; Smith Terrace with its monstrous bugs, immune to sulphur-fumes; the World’s End; the lower end of Redcliffe Road.

At the lower end of Redcliffe Road there was a cat-haunted landing: in front of him there was a cupboard and directly to his right the door of a room with a tea-party going on in it. There came back to him the nature of the dim, filtered light on the landing, the shadowy colour of the door, the smell of that London staircase in the winter and the sound of the tea-party, to which they had asked him. He was rather late, in so far as it was possible to be late for one of these indefinite meetings, which took place at night: later, at any rate, than he intended; for in that rabbit-warren of a house, now abandoned to a multitude of people with one room apiece, the servants’ staircase forked into three, and dark passages wandered here and there among the cisterns, promising short cuts. However, he had reached the door and he was in the act of feeling for the handle when on the other side of the matchboard partition a voice as clear as a bell said, ‘Richard Temple.’

‘Richard Temple, the new person in Andromeda’s old room, is also a painter.’

‘So she told me. Tell us about him.’

‘Oh, he is not so bad, really,’ said a man, as if he had been appealed to; and content with this tepid recommendation Richard would have opened the door if another voice had not cried out passionately, ‘No, no, no. He is a silly bastard. Temple is a very silly bastard.’

Richard could not for the moment decide what face to put on this, and he stayed where he was.

‘That is no news,’ said Julia (and the treachery pierced him where he stood). ‘He told me he was the illegitimate son of somebody or other, but it was a great secret, and not to be known. By way of keeping it dark he told Kate Hassel, too.’

‘I mean bastard in the sense you say he’s a bastard. If you want to be literal you say basstard.’

‘Everybody has hoped they were illegits or foundlings at some period.’

‘Yes, but they do not go on with their mysterious nods and becks after sixteen. Missing heirs and strawberry marks are not grown up.’

‘Who is this? Who is your bastard?’

‘Richard Temple. The young man who has Andromeda’s old room.’

‘I know him. He is one of those popular phalluses.’

‘I do not know him.’

‘Of course you do. He is the young man who got Anne with child, the one she said practically invented art.’

‘He is at the Reynolds. They say he is very good.’

‘No they do not,’ said Spado, a fellow-student. ‘He is very slick and clever, if you like, but nobody says he is very good except the duller members of the staff. He came as protégé of Atherton’s, so naturally old Dover and old Wilson loved him from the first. He is just their cup of tea: very dainty and competent.’

‘No one could call poor Spado competent. Everybody else at the school says Temple is very good – he won the Haydon.’

‘Exactly,’ cried Spado, with an immense sneer in his voice to show how discreditable it was to win an official prize. ‘Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit: that’s exactly what I object to. Painting is not an amusement.’ There was a great deal of confused noise at this, and the conversation broke up into several parts; there was movement, changing of seats, and suddenly, right next to the door, so near that his voice resonated in Richard’s ear like the diaphragm of an earphone, a new man said very confidentially, ‘There are always contacts, isn’t it absurd? I heard of him a great while ago, from my aunt’s cousins: an extraordinary fellow, who burgled his school, and set fire to it.’

‘Who?’

‘This chap they are talking about – Temple.’

‘Oh? I do not know anything about him. But I am glad he set fire to his school; it sounds spirited. Most of these people are so wet.’

At a little distance the bell-like voice called out, ‘Plage, Plage, come and sit with us, and tell us about our new neighbour. Plage knows him well.’

‘He has, I am afraid, no settled system of any sort,’ said Plage, ‘so that his conduct must not be strictly scrutinised. His affections are social and generous, perhaps; but his desire for imaginary consequence predominates over his attention to truth.’

‘He is also a frightful snob.’

‘He says that he has been at Munich, a fiction so easily detected that it is wonderful how he should have been so inconsiderate as to hazard it.’

‘He told me that he had visited the Isles of Langerhans too.’

‘The trouble with him …’ began Spado trenchantly, but he was overborne and no more could be heard except ‘Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit’ again and, ‘It is one of these little showy talents that fizzle out in a flood of decoration. He reminds me of Sert.’

‘We will not attend to poor jealous Spado. They all say that he is good but they all admit he is an ass; which is very strange.’

‘Why do you find it strange? What makes you think there is any relation between painting and common intelligence?’

Spado repeated, ‘One of these talents that fizzle out in decoration,’ and an electric light, turned on by some lower switch, suddenly illuminated Richard, while a couple of even later guests came swarming up the stairs, peering upwards and hooting: retreat was impossible, and with as even a countenance as he could manage he opened the door and walked in. It was strange to see how the voices paired with the faces and how their knowing looks were all dissembled. Judas Julia smiled at him; his hosts looked welcoming; and it occurred to him that people often spoke like this behind his back.

He had suspected for some time that he was not doing very well, but this whole-hearted, unequivocal confirmation went far beyond the worst of his dim, vague apprehension. (As for their praise, he did not reckon it any comfort; he scarcely noticed it – there was not one of them whose good opinion of his work meant anything at all.)

Yet now from this remote impartial view what surprised him was not the way some of them ganged up on him while they let still more offensive youths get away with more, but rather the tolerance of others; for indeed he must have been a monster at that stage.

Such elaborate, unnecessary poses, such attitudes … through the prodigious distance he could still see some of them. He beheld them without any tenderness, for the person back there was so disguised by fermenting youth, so drunk with it and removed from his ordinary nature, that he could feel little responsibility; he looked at them rather with astonishment, for he could no longer make out what some of the attitudes were meant to signify. Perhaps they were literally meaningless, like those profound looks of the young, in which it is hoped that someone else will supply the significance: perhaps they only meant that to épater les bourgeois was the highest aim in life.

It was this ferment that caused him to depart from his natural solitude and to dread the loneliness that he had always accepted: he was a natural solitary, and he had little social talent or discrimination. How much was nature and how much circumstance? He had been brought up alone and he had passed many of his formative years without the ordinary contacts; yet on the other hand his father, with a totally different upbringing, had much the same want of tact. Whatever the cause, the result was much the same: he danced with the grace of a half-taught bear. Just as homosexuals often find life in a heterosexual society difficult because the heterosexual culture is concerned with handing on heterosexual experience, discussing heterosexual attitudes and providing literary bases for conduct, so that the homosexual has no great corpus of information and accepted attitudes to draw upon but is obliged to work out everything for himself from the start (a task beyond the capacity of most), so the solitary finds life in a gregarious society laborious and baffling. He is not provided with some of the natural qualities of the rest, and he does not understand the wider sense of the common social rules but clings to them as arbitrary formulæ: though indeed the comparison is not very just, for the solitary is rarely as committed to his solitude as the pederast to his boys. Yet however lame the comparison, Richard certainly found reality difficult to make out, and he certainly floundered more than most.

The world in which he lived, it is true, was concerned more with things of the spirit than was the Stock Exchange; but this did not make it all of a piece nor prevent it from being pretty phoney in a great many of its aspects – there were the inevitable hordes of silly and dirty people in search of a literary justification for silliness and dirt, the uncircumcised Jews and the white Negroes, as well as the lechers – and there was a strong sense of class distinction, which ran, apart from a few obvious inversions, upon exactly the same lines as those which divided Easton Colborough into its unnumbered castes. Indeed it would have been necessary to escape from England altogether to escape from this pressure: he was more conscious of it now, and he coped with it as well as he could, with little regard for honesty and without much skill … he must often have made himself ridiculous, and he certainly made himself disliked.

Yet though his prating, his dogmatism, his violence and his affectation rather told against him in gatherings of more than a few people, he could be agreeable in a simple relationship, a tête à tête; and upon the whole he enjoyed those last years of play. He was, in some respects, an undifferentiated youth, scarcely to be distinguished from the herd of his contemporaries, who all looked very much alike; and in the same way the greater part of his young women (the principal source of his joys and pains) were undifferentiated girls. Though indeed there were some lovely exceptions. He had abounding health and vitality and the energy usual at his age; the smell of the streets and the plane trees were aphrodisiac, and he was as amorous as a dove. Love had come late to him, but this was obviously through no irremediable block, for the emotion was very strong – a great turbulence of spirit; yet it was less an exclusive desire for any one girl than for all nubile womankind and although the affectionate and sentimental side of his nature attempted to disguise this from him in fact he often behaved with so shocking a degree of two-faced promiscuity that it was surprising that he was able to maintain his conviction that he was an excellent and virtuous man.

He rarely knew any of them well: he was barely acquainted with them as people, and indeed most of them were vague enough to be mistaken for one another in the dark. Perhaps there is not often much friendship between young men and women, and certainly there cannot be much intimacy of mind where each is preoccupied by a rôle. He did not know many of them, and now in the course of a somewhat caddish enumeration he found that many of them he could not remember except as part of a picture: their names, unbacked by any definite character, had faded, and they were replaced by the shape of hands, body, face and colour. A likely wench may be told by the jut of her bum: it really meant her likeliness, no doubt; but it was very true in another sense. He saw the lovely pearly buttocks of a round blonde girl, nacreous in the light of dawn, and himself so drained of desire that he could consider them then as objectively as he did now – a question then of light and surface; now of identification. Did not know them: and what is more, although he was passionate and sentimental he doubted whether he had even really liked the most part of them.

It was a rather subhuman activity: but most of these grapplings had another end as well – at this period he was a great talker, and his loquacity suffered from a night alone. How much he talked, and what balls; and when mendacity sickened him, he fell into the other extreme of candour; but he never would be quiet or continent. There were only two things which showed that he was capable of reticence at all: from superstitious motives as well as from piety he did not speak much of his occasional visitation, and those he did tell he told in confidence – he expected a high degree of honour in others, and discretion. The thing itself, the presence, the eudaemon, the possessor or the breath of God (as he privately considered it) had not been with him for a long time; hardly since he was in France, and only once with the same overwhelming certainty. He did not understand its laws: it would never come without industry, yet no amount of industry could bring it; it could not be surprised or forced. Yet he was sure that it had nothing to do with common goodness and that the God whose breath it was had no relation to the God he had been told about – nothing to do with religion, to which he was profoundly indifferent, if not hostile.

And then even at his most garrulous he kept his essential privacy untouched, his real nakedness. He might even have been able to bar it out of his own recollection if only every month, every Christmas, Easter and birthday had not brought a letter. At first the envelopes were typed by the people at the place where his mother was kept, but then they started coming in her hand, so completely unaltered that the sight of it made him tremble. He had opened them at first. They were odd, prim letters, obviously written under direction, impersonal and uninterested; and he had answered them in agony with trite phrases that concealed a burning prayer to be forgotten. But in time he left them unopened and answered with set phrases and a mechanical account of his progress, so far as it was acceptable. There was no difficulty in this, particularly at first: he started at the Reynolds as well as his friends could have wished – his technical abilities were far above the average and his training fitted him perfectly for the old-fashioned academic official standards reigning there. It was the best school, in that it was the oldest and that it had the most prestige; it had Academicians as lecturers and its diploma was the best qualification an art-teacher could possess; but it was an unpolished place, with an almost medical roughness, and there was nothing in its traditions to make Richard any less barbarous: worse, the best students, and particularly the painters, despised its methods and its aims after their first few terms. However, he began well. There were only two or three who could rival him, and in his first year he won the Haydon prize, which was the best the school could offer, apart from the leaving premium. Yet it was never much satisfaction to him; and even that little evaporated as he wrote it down in these dreadful letters – he could scarcely bear to look at the envelopes as he addressed them: and as for hers, he no longer opened them. Yet he could not bring himself to burn them as they came, and one after another they piled up on the far side of his mantelpiece, with his name turned down.

At the other end of the mantelpiece there was a little pile of white postcards: these came every week from Canon Harler’s bank, and he was supposed to post them back, acknowledging the thirty shillings that accompanied them, but he never did, and indeed he had some vague notion of steaming off the halfpenny stamps in time and selling them to a person in an office.

Canon Harler had cut up very ugly, very rough, when he found that he had a whore in the family and a whoreson thievish incendiary for a nephew. ‘The evil brute must have set it alight in half a dozen places at least,’ he said bitterly: yet there were people who seemed to entertain a very curious view of the whole affair, even to the extent of perverting the course of justice to protect the boy from the rightful consequences of his own actions. It was the status of these allies that staggered Canon Harler: Mr Holden of Plimpton Hall was not only a magistrate and an intimate friend of the chief constable but a deputy lieutenant, Atherton was an R.A. and Colonel Apse the cousin of an important politician. Yet these people were not only willing to square the police and the schoolmaster, but even to maintain the boy in France. As a good committee-man he felt the sense of the house and he very smoothly overrode his personal views which were strictly of the whip, cold water and Antipodes variety; for he was a man who would sell his soul for a mitre, and he did not wish to offend any man who might have interest. The canon conceived a sort of respect for Richard, because of these allies, and it lasted even after Richard’s patrons were scattered by death and the depression – Plimpton Hall empty, grass tall on the drive and in all the grey windows broken glass, the Holdens gone; and Colonel Apse, still uncertain of what had happened, trying to live on the uncommuted quarter of his pension in a boarding-house – and it made him speak humanely to Richard at the time: he had not committed himself to any personal expenditure, but he had spoken kindly and with hope – vague, indefinable semi-promises. More than that, he had later undertaken to allow Richard seventy-eight pounds a year against Mr Atherton’s legacy, though not without a very high degree of anxiety lest it should involve him in a loss; for although Mr Atherton had written Richard down for a sum that should have seen him handsomely through his studies the estate was much confused – it was extremely difficult to realise in this, the worst phase of the slump, and as far as the executors could see they would not be able to pay more than half the stated sum, and that not for several years. He was still reasonably polite when they met: the Reynolds School was well known, it was old, and it was creditable to have a connection elected to a scholarship there. When Richard won the Haydon, Canon Harler took him to the Café Royal instead of Lyons, and gave him a pound with less moral gesticulation than he usually employed over half a crown. He also said that the world was an oyster, with the general intention of alluding gracefully to a palette-knife.